The Courier & Press Preseason Track Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Courier & Press preseason track athlete of the year is

Every preseason, the Evansville Courier & Press asks its high school sports readers a single question on a Crowdsignal poll that poll.fm hosts: who is the preseason track athlete of the year? The programme is a straight public vote. Ballot 15204726 prints a list of track and field nominees from Indiana high schools, each shown by name with the school they run and jump for, and the paper's readers decide the outcome with their clicks.

The publisher is the Evansville Courier & Press, the Gannett and USA TODAY Network daily that covers southwestern Indiana. Its poll.fm series is one of several fan votes the paper runs across the school year, and this one is timed before the track season proper begins, which is what the word preseason signals on the ballot title.

The essentials, as they stand on the live ballot:

One thing this ballot does not do is explain its own awards structure. The page is a poll, not a rules document, and readers who want the publisher's reasoning behind the preseason format need to look at the paper's sports coverage rather than the voting page itself.

The dated history of the preseason track ballot

Two editions of this programme are confirmed: 2023 and 2025. The poll.fm series carried the 2025 edition in March of that year, which is why the ballot's voting window maps to March in the publisher's calendar for that cycle. There is no confirmed edition for 2024 on this ballot, and nothing in the paper's printed material explains the gap between the two years, so anyone planning around this vote should treat it as a series that has run in 2023 and 2025 rather than an unbroken annual fixture.

The current live ballot carries a printed deadline of noon CT on Friday, Aug. 21. That is the only dated instruction the voting page itself gives; no opening date, no nomination phase, and no round structure appear beside it. The publisher's preseason football vote, a sibling programme from the same newsroom, printed an article alongside its ballot stating that the poll stays open through noon CT on Aug. 21 and instructing supporters to refresh the page to vote multiple times, but those instructions belong to the football vote, and the track ballot's own rules are not printed.

What is missing matters as much as what is printed. Evansville Courier & Press has not published a category roster for this track vote, has not stated a per-supporter vote limit, and has not printed an eligibility rule for nominees; for all three gaps, confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the track ballot today

Supporting a nominee here takes almost no effort, which is why the paper's polls move fast once word spreads through school communities. A supporter opens poll.fm 15204726, reads the question at the top of the ballot, and sees the nominee list below it. Each entry pairs an athlete's name with an Indiana high school, and the list runs straight down the page with no seeding or ranking shown. The supporter selects one entry and presses the vote button.

Crowdsignal, the platform hosting this ballot, is a straightforward public voting service. Once a vote is cast, the page shows the running tally for every nominee on the ballot, so supporters can watch the standings move in real time. That visible tally is part of why these newspaper polls generate repeat visits: a school community that sees its nominee slip down the count has an immediate, visible reason to come back before the deadline.

Three practical points shape the day. First, the voting URL is the latest live ballot in the series, and older poll.fm links from past articles are dead ends for the current vote. Second, the printed cutoff is noon CT on Friday, Aug. 21, and a vote that lands after a Crowdsignal ballot closes does nothing. Third, this edition's page carries no printed per-supporter rule, so the instructions shown beside the poll on voting day are the only operative text, and reading them takes less time than arguing about them afterwards.

How this ballot sits beside the paper's other Indiana votes

The Evansville Courier & Press track vote is not alone. Indiana carries a cluster of newspaper and statewide high school fan votes on Crowdsignal, and this programme shares the poll.fm infrastructure with six of them. The nearest relative is the Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year, a preseason and end-of-season football ballot from the same newsroom that focuses on southwestern Indiana football and runs separately from the paper's weekly athlete polls. Its printed refresh instruction is the closest thing this publisher has published to a voting rule, which is why the football article matters as a reference point even though it governs a different ballot.

The wider Indiana set includes the Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week, a weekly fan vote from the Bloomington paper, and the statewide Indiana football player of the week vote. Three further programmes run under the SI banner: the Indiana SI boys basketball ballot, plus the 3A and 4A Indiana SI football votes, each split by class.

What makes the track ballot distinct is its sport and its timing. Every sibling covers football or basketball or runs weekly during a season; this one is the only confirmed track and field vote in the set, and it is positioned before the season starts. A nominee's supporters therefore face a quieter ballot with fewer competing campaigns than the football polls draw, but also a shorter window of attention from the paper's readership, because preseason interest peaks early and moves on once meets begin.

Strengthening support for a track nominee

A preseason track ballot rewards whoever mobilizes fastest, because the deadline of noon CT on Friday, Aug. 21 sits before the season gives nominees other headlines. The most reliable support comes from the school itself: the track team's own accounts, the athletic department's pages, and families who already follow the programme. Point them at poll.fm 15204726, name the nominee in the post, and repeat the deadline in every message rather than assuming everyone saw it the first time.

The organizer's printed rules for this edition do not cover outside help, so there is no stated prohibition to read against the ballot page itself. What the football sibling's article shows is that this publisher does print instructions when it wants supporters to behave a certain way, and the absence of similar text on the track ballot means the poll's own behaviour, its tally and its cutoff, is the constraint. If you want a broader view of methods that work on public newspaper polls, our page on getting more votes online covers the mechanics across this format in detail.